NAME

perlLoL - Manipulating Lists of Lists in Perl

DESCRIPTION

Declaration and Access of Lists of Lists

The simplest thing to build is a list of lists (sometimes called an array of arrays). It's reasonably easy to understand, and almost everything that applies here will also be applicable later on with the fancier data structures.

A list of lists, or an array of an array if you would, is just a regular old array @LoL that you can get at with two subscripts, like $LoL[3][2]. Here's a declaration of the array:

Now you should be very careful that the outer bracket type is a round one, that is, a parenthesis. That's because you're assigning to an @list, so you need parentheses. If you wanted there not to be an @LoL, but rather just a reference to it, you could do something more like this:

Notice that the outer bracket type has changed, and so our access syntax has also changed. That's because unlike C, in perl you can't freely interchange arrays and references thereto. $ref_to_LoL is a reference to an array, whereas @LoL is an array proper. Likewise, $LoL[2] is not an array, but an array ref. So how come you can write these:

$LoL[2][2]
$ref_to_LoL->[2][2]

instead of having to write these:

$LoL[2]->[2]
$ref_to_LoL->[2]->[2]

Well, that's because the rule is that on adjacent brackets only (whether square or curly), you are free to omit the pointer dereferencing arrow. But you cannot do so for the very first one if it's a scalar containing a reference, which means that $ref_to_LoL always needs it.

Growing Your Own

That's all well and good for declaration of a fixed data structure, but what if you wanted to add new elements on the fly, or build it up entirely from scratch?

First, let's look at reading it in from a file. This is something like adding a row at a time. We'll assume that there's a flat file in which each line is a row and each word an element. If you're trying to develop an @LoL list containing all these, here's the right way to do that:

while (<>) {
@tmp = split;
push @LoL, [ @tmp ];
}

You might also have loaded that from a function:

for $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
$LoL[$i] = [ somefunc($i) ];
}

Or you might have had a temporary variable sitting around with the list in it.

for $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
@tmp = somefunc($i);
$LoL[$i] = [ @tmp ];
}

It's very important that you make sure to use the [] list reference constructor. That's because this will be very wrong:

$LoL[$i] = @tmp;

You see, assigning a named list like that to a scalar just counts the number of elements in @tmp, which probably isn't what you want.

If you are running under use strict, you'll have to add some declarations to make it happy:

In fact, that wouldn't even compile. How come? Because the argument to push() must be a real array, not just a reference to such.

Access and Printing

Now it's time to print your data structure out. How are you going to do that? Well, if you want only one of the elements, it's trivial:

print $LoL[0][0];

If you want to print the whole thing, though, you can't say

print @LoL; # WRONG

because you'll get just references listed, and perl will never automatically dereference things for you. Instead, you have to roll yourself a loop or two. This prints the whole structure, using the shell-style for() construct to loop across the outer set of subscripts.

Slices

If you want to get at a slice (part of a row) in a multidimensional array, you're going to have to do some fancy subscripting. That's because while we have a nice synonym for single elements via the pointer arrow for dereferencing, no such convenience exists for slices. (Remember, of course, that you can always write a loop to do a slice operation.)

Here's how to do one operation using a loop. We'll assume an @LoL variable as before.